Simultaneously delivering hundreds of video program channels in real time to consumers requires large amounts of expensive bandwidth and there is no guarantee that the viewers will be satisfied with any particular program at any particular time. Digital video recorder (DVR) set top boxes (STBs), like TiVo, allow consumers to selectively record programs that they like and view them later at their convenience. But this still requires that the selected programs must have been broadcast recently and the DVR prepared to capture it. Other distribution channels such as movie theaters and video rental outlets offer very restricted choices, require personal visits to brick-and-mortar locations, and charge premium prices because the content is so fresh from its original release.
Video on-demand (VOD) was initially offered on a few cable channels and the menu of offerings was very limited. Navigating through the short menus was not much of a problem. However, video-on-demand technology and the programming being offered have expanded enormously, and navigating through all of the material to find a program for ingestion into the system and for viewing has become quite a challenge.
The widespread acceptance and installation of broadband Internet now allows an interactive way for consumers to surf through vast stores of video content they would like to select and view. The broadcast bandwidth needed by TV broadcasts, cable systems, and direct satellites, is not needed when only a single program is being viewed. So, the video industry is moving rapidly toward providing consumers with any program content, anywhere, at anytime.
For example, a device can be attached to the back of a television set to provide access to streaming video delivered over a broadband connection. This service is widely referred to as “over-the-top”. Because traditional middleman distribution services are bypassed, the video content goes directly to the consumer on top of the broadband connection. For service providers that have a large installed base of video service delivery infrastructure for linear and on-demand video services, being able to provide access to over-the-top content through existing infrastructure is a great value.
Compared to traditional video-on-demand, online video is more dynamic, has more titles in short format, and depends on different video encoding formats. While the video encoding format problem can be solved with universal transcoding, the dynamic nature and the plethora of over-the-top content create new challenges to the existing video-on-demand system.
Conventional video-on-demand back offices (VBO) control video-on-demand ingest on video-on-demand servers. The ingest process does not provide enough automation to support dynamic ingest. Dynamic ingest is triggered, e.g., when a VOD server application does not find a client's requested content in its local storage. In typical VOD current architectures, the navigation server is tightly coupled with video-on-demand content management, and the video-on-demand navigation only allows a set top box to navigate among content that has been previously ingested to the video-on-demand system. Some video-on-demand navigation servers support searches, but the searches are limited to previously ingested video content. Though this works fine for a movies-on-demand service that has a limited number of titles and the release schedule is rather static, this is not a good approach for the more dynamic over-the-top content.
In a typical video-on-demand system, the VOD back office is a complicated control plane system that provides the basic control infrastructure to deliver video-on-demand service. Any new on-demand video features must be added through the video-on-demand back office which slows down the service velocity for the service provider to launch any new on-demand video services. Video-on-demand navigation servers provide the user interface on a STB that is needed to navigate the available video-on-demand content. Conventional video-on-demand navigation servers are tightly coupled with video-on-demand back office content management and the navigation server communicates with a video-on-demand back office to build a menu hierarchy and search databases using all of the titles that have already been ingested and processed.
The ingest of content for conventional video-on-demand servers, e.g., movies-on-demand, is prearranged and happens regardless of what users are selecting to watch. Prearranging the ingest of all available over-the-top content not only wastes system resources since most of the content will not be watched at all, but it is also becoming technically infeasible considering the dynamic nature of over-the-top content and the potentially infinite amount of content available. In many cases, the existing VOD navigation and back office systems also impose severe scalability limits on the total number of uniquely addressable assets—they were designed to manage a relatively short number of premium, long-form assets and not the massive number of assets available in an over-the-top environment.